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Macdiarmid's Poetry and Politics in Montrose

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Macdiarmid's Poetry and Politics in Montrose View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Repository@Napier ‘Genius in a Provincial Town’: MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics in Montrose Scott Lyall In Scottish Studies Review 5.2 (Autumn 2004), 41−55. Focusing on the Scots lyrics of Sangschaw (1925) and Penny Wheep (1926), this article explores the ways in which Christopher Murray Grieve’s activities in Montrose as a journalist with the Montrose Review and as an independent member of the local council helped enable the finding of his artistic voice, Hugh MacDiarmid. Using previously unpublished archival material from the Montrose Review, this article argues that his early modernist poetry in Scots and the radical politics that he pursued both locally and nationally were valuably stimulated by his daily engagement with the Montrose community, principally through his work as a journalist and councillor. The article examines the under-researched area of MacDiarmid’s professional working life, emphasising his vigorous localism during almost a decade in the Angus town in the 1920s. It aims to deepen our sense of a civic commitment to Montrose that facilitated his internationalist vision of an independent Scotland through a dynamic commingling of the local, the national and the universal. The MacDiarmid of Lucky Poet (1943) may have believed himself to be a ‘genius in a provincial town’ while living in Montrose – writing scornfully in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) that his fellow townsfolk ‘continue / To lead their livin’ death’ – but his period there also displays a dedicated striving to serve and radically transform the place in which he wrote much of his best poetry and envisioned a Scottish political and cultural renaissance.1 1 MacDiarmid had two spells in Montrose. He was demobilised from the British army as a non-combatant in 1919 and went to St Andrews where his first wife Peggy was living. From the university town, MacDiarmid found employment as a reporter in Montrose with the local newspaper, the Montrose Review. He left his first stint in Montrose in October 1920 to work as a private tutor at Kildermorie Lodge in Ross and Cromarty. In November 1920, the poet and propagandist of the Scottish renaissance had already begun what Alan Bold calls ‘the first step in a campaign strategically masterminded by Grieve’, publishing a new group of Scottish poets in the first series of the anthology Northern Numbers.2 He also edited and wrote much of the Scottish Chapbook and began working on articles that would later be collected as the controversial Contemporary Scottish Studies (1926), his modernist blast at Scotland’s cultural kailyard. However, aged twenty-eight and married to Peggy, he was tempted back to the Review in April 1921 by the promise of increased wages. His second period in Montrose, which became the focus of the Scottish renaissance, saw MacDiarmid even more surely ‘enter heart and body and soul into a new Scots Nationalist propaganda’ that he had planned as early as October 1916 from ‘somewhere in Macedonia’.3 MacDiarmid’s modernist manifesto for Scottish cultural and political regeneration, ambitiously implemented during the 1920s from the seemingly peripheral setting of Montrose, was mapped out during the First World War. Supposedly fighting for the rights of small nations, the British were also bloodily dealing with the Irish rebels of Easter 1916. MacDiarmid wanted a nationalist movement that would enable Scotland to find its true identity, not as a provincialised handmaiden to the imperialism administered in Ireland, but as an independent nation radically opposed to the metropolitan and capitalist values of the big battalions. 2 Subsequently helping to form the National Party of Scotland in 1928, his important visit that year to Dublin, where he met Éamon de Valera and W.B. Yeats, confirmed his wish for a Celtic confederacy against British imperialism. Inspired by the Irish Republicans to advance the Scottish nationalist cause, MacDiarmid was also radically politicised by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In 1920 (the year in which the Communist Party of Great Britain was founded) in his first period in Montrose, C.M. Grieve gave a lecture to the local branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) on ‘Lenin – The Man and His Message and Methods’.4 Grieve joined the ILP in 1908 when he was unsuccessfully training to be a teacher in Edinburgh. In 1911 he became a junior reporter with the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, but his radical journalism didn’t find expression until later the same year with the Monmouthshire Labour News in South Wales. He then worked briefly as a reporter in Clydebank and Renfrew (1912), Cupar (1912) and Forfar (1913), before the war of 1914-18 intervened. MacDiarmid believed his ‘out-and-out Radicalism and Republicanism’ came from his upbringing in small-town Langholm, where he was born in 1892.5 However, it was not until he moved to Montrose in the 1920s that his radical Scottish nationalism found its most propitious place from which to be practiced. Effectively and ingeniously, MacDiarmid’s managed to interrelate his political and cultural activities in Montrose through his occupation as a journalist. The Scots lyric poetry of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep, while not directly political in content, is the creative manifestation of the cultural and political ideas that MacDiarmid propagandised through the pages of various periodicals such as the Scottish Nation and in the Montrose Review. Established in 1811, the Montrose Review is one of the oldest weekly newspapers in Scotland. When MacDiarmid worked there this eight- 3 page Liberal newspaper would appear every Friday. Like most provincial papers, it fused mainly local concerns with reports of the most significant national and international events. MacDiarmid’s job was that of editor-reporter. According to Bold, this meant that he ‘wrote most of the contents’.6 Tempting as this may be to believe, the very structure of the Review and indeed all newspapers, wherein particular subject areas are assigned to individuals with the requisite knowledge and experience, makes it unlikely. It would be a surprise if MacDiarmid was found to be the author of the weekly round-up of farming news, ‘Poultry Notes’. The most obvious difficulty in identifying MacDiarmid’s contribution to the Montrose Review is the anonymity of the articles. His hand can only be discerned by what must pass for educated guesswork. As we shall see, the probability of an article being by MacDiarmid centres on its purposiveness and radical ideas. Though one cannot be sure of his authorship, the material cited here from the Review is characteristic of his concerns. As Glen Murray states, ‘The principle of putting controversial and sometimes quite arcane ideas before a wide audience in the columns of a newspaper was one he used repeatedly.’7 MacDiarmid’s journalism substantially aided his industrious push for political and cultural change in Scotland. Throughout 1923, the year Grieve’s first book Annals of the Five Senses was published, the Montrose Review carried syndicated articles from the Scottish Nation, a literary, cultural and political journal devoted to Scottish interests that MacDiarmid helped to establish in that year. Syndicated articles were sold to a number of different publications to be printed simultaneously. This allowed for a larger, non-specialist readership to be reached, multiplying the potential impact of one piece. For MacDiarmid, this was crucial in his propaganda programme for Scottish renaissance. He would struggle to win a wide readership for ideologically 4 nationalist and short-lived intellectual journals such as the Scottish Nation, the Scottish Chapbook and the Northern Review.8 However, by 1928, the polyphonic MacDiarmid claimed that through ‘a special bureau formed for the purpose (in connection with the Scottish Home Rule Movement)’, he was reaching up to forty local weekly newspapers across Scotland by means of syndication.9 He further boosted his nationalist concerns in the Montrose Review by commenting on his own activities in different sections of the newspaper. For instance, in ‘Round the Town’ from 25 May 1923 we have a writer, probably MacDiarmid, congratulating C.M. Grieve on the Scottish Nation: It is inconceivable that Scotsmen and Scotswomen will not welcome their new weekly. By all the tokens, it is assured of such a vigorous measure of support as will give it a long and healthy life and so reward the public spirit and enterprise of its promoters. No one who believes that mind is greater than matter can afford to miss a copy of ‘The Scottish Nation’ – if for nothing else than the fact of its promise of forcing the pace in the strife to compel an unrepresentative Parliament in which an alien, although neighbouring country is a ‘Predominant’ partner to hand over to Scotland her right to manage Scottish affairs in her distinctively Scottish manner.10 Such self-promotion must have been invaluable when launching the Scottish Nation. From a provincial setting, MacDiarmid was aiming to become the voice of a new internationalist Scotland. He also made his radical voice heard in the council chamber of Montrose. MacDiarmid began working for Montrose Town Council on 13 March 1922 on a 5 provisional basis, replacing Councillor James Davidson who had resigned.11 In November of that year, C.M. Grieve sought the votes of the people of Montrose in the Municipal Election with this address in the Montrose Review: Journalism rightly-conceived is a training in the understanding of public affairs and in the formulation and expression of opinion. Journalists have rendered public service to Montrose before. Having been requested to stand for the Town Council, it will be my earnest endeavour, if returned, to worthily follow these precedents. I am opposed to ‘secret diplomacy’ in public affairs.
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